When comparing GitHub vs Launchpad, the Slant community recommends GitHub for most people. In the question“What are the best hosted version control services?”GitHub is ranked 2nd while Launchpad is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose GitHub is:

GitHub has integrated issue tracking that makes hunting and solving bugs easy. Each project's issues page can be filtered by closed issues, assignees, labels and milestones. Issues are also sortable by age, number of comments and update time.

Pros

Pro

Integrated issue tracking

GitHub has integrated issue tracking that makes hunting and solving bugs easy. Each project's issues page can be filtered by closed issues, assignees, labels and milestones. Issues are also sortable by age, number of comments and update time.

Pro

Nice and usable UI

GitHub's UI is clean and intuitive. Each view is designed to not fill the screen with useless information.

For example, the repository view displays only the most crucial data about that repo - on the top it displays the number of commits, branches, releases and contributors. When clicked, each of them will take the user to a page that displays more detailed information.

Pro

Provides free hosting for static websites

GitHub Pages is a feature that allows developers to create websites for their projects or anything they need a static website for, for free.

Pro

Anyone can fork

Any user can fork a project and submit a pull request. If accepted by the owner, the fork will be merged with the master branch.

Pro

GitHub makes it easy to find open source projects

GitHub is the largest host in the world for open source projects. Developers from all over the world fork and work on countless projects hosted on it.

GitHub's search box is a powerful tool that allows developers to find open source projects in areas they are interested in and where they can immediately start to contribute.

GitHub also has a page dedicated solely at exploring and finding open source projects, grouping them by each topic they cover. In the same view, GitHub displays trending repositories and sorting them by day, week or month.

Pro

Large community

GitHub is the largest code host on the planet with over 21.4 million hosted repositories and many users. It's unarguably the largest VCS used by developers worldwide and as such, it has a vibrant community that follows it resulting in many guides and tutorials for new users. Even experienced developers can always find an answer to any question they may have.

Pro

Gist (Snippets)

Gists is GitHub's way to easily share code, text snippets or any kind of information with the world. They are an easy way to share text and they work as Git repos, which means that they are forkable and versioned. They are also fully compatible with Git.

Pro

Simplified team management tools

GitHub has easy and useful features to control teams, large and small alike. Team members can be given different powers on different projects, ranging from the ability to create them, to only being able to have read-only access.

Pro

Convenient continuous integration with Travis CI

GitHub can be integrated with Travis CI for code testing and deployment, furthermore it is free of charge for free open-source projects.

Pro

Supports Two-Factor authentication

GitHub has added another layer of security to their user accounts. This layer comes in the form of Two-Factor authentication. After it's enabled, GitHub delivers an authentication code by SMS, or by a free application for smartphones. After two-factor authentication is enabled, the authentication code is sent to the account owner's phone any time someone attempts to sign into their GitHub account. This means that only someone who has both the password and authentication code can sign into the account.

Pro

Code search functionality

GitHub supports searching code. Whether it's from a specific project or from the whole website. What's more, GitHub has excellent SEO and you can easily find any line of code hosted on public repos on GitHub even from Google.

Pro

Easy integration with cloud hosting services

Many widely used cloud hosting services are easily integrated with GitHub. Any project hosted on GitHub can be set up on these services in seconds. Some companies that offer this feature are:

Amazon Web Services

Google Cloud

Heroku

Windows Azure

Pro

Excellent native apps

GitHub has native apps for mobile (iOS and Android), Windows and Mac, which make code deployment easier and faster.

Pro

Support for mandatory code reviews

GitHub allows maintainers to make code reviews mandatory for any repository they choose.

Pro

Student discounts

GitHub offers very good student discounts along with other things, such as AWS credits.

Pro

Additional features for academics

For those with a valid .edu email or valid school ID there are additional benefits such as free private hosting. While it may take time for the account to be verified, it can easily be worth it.

Pro

Project management tools available

GitHub has a tool called (quite intuitively) "Projects". It helps teams to organize and prioritize the work they are doing by creating roadmaps and release checklists.

Pro

Support for web based translation

Launchpad makes it easy to translate free open source projects into virtually any language in the world. Users are allowed to start working on translating any project they want just by having a Launchpad account and a web browser. Most of the time they don't have to even join a team to start working and the editor is web based, so there is no need for any special software.

Pro

Integrated build/deployment system

If you use launchpad, it gives you a build system (on their platform) as well as easier deployment - user merely adds your PPA to their sources.list file. Deployment (on Ubuntu, at least - other debians as well) doesn't get simpler than this.

Pro

Great bug tracking features

Launchpad is built to be used for open source projects, as such it needs a powerful bug trackers to allow developers who want to contribute to jump right in. Launchpad displays bug statistics (total number of bugs, number of bugs fixed etc...) as well. Bugs can be searched and displayed from every project hosted on Launchpad or for single projects.

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Cons

Con

Only public repositories are free

Unfortunately, GitHub offers closed repositories only for premium users, and the price is not cheap at all.

Con

Rule of thumb: 1GB per repository, 100MB per file

For most repositories this is acceptable, but for already large repositories with a long history, this may be a limiting factor.

Con

Using it encourages other tools to integrate only with GitHub, leading to a monopoly

Con

Proprietary

Con

Owned by Microsoft

Con

No OAuth2 support

In order to sign in to GitHub, users have to sign up first with unique credentials for GitHub only, so no option to sign in with Google+ or Facebook.

Con

Very inconvenient UI

Very hard to switch between projects.

Con

The web interface is complicated and hard to use

Other project hosts such as GitHub, BitBucket or GitLab have easy, simplistic UIs that help new and experienced developers alike to browse code right through the browser. LaunchPad on the other hand is very weak at this. Most of the projects have poor (if any) documentation and no way to determine a project's worth easily. The fastest way to do so with LaunchPad would be to download the project and look through the code manually, which is quite tiresome.

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